Intriguing matchups mark opening round

At 38-44, Milwaukee’s presence in the playoffs speaks to the top-heavy nature of the Eastern Conference.

The Bucks have no business being in the field. By the middle of next week, they’ll wish they had been in the draft lottery.

The Miami-Milwaukee matchup is one of the biggest mismatches in recent postseason memory, certain to produce a Heat sweep. But it’s an anomaly of the first round this year.

The rest of it is full of interesting matchups, and the real surprise will be if all the higher seeds advance.

Start with the 4-5 matchups in both conferences. It took the second tiebreaker (better record within the conference) for the Clippers to earn home-court advantage against the Grizzlies, whose 56-26 record makes them the most successful team to have to open a first-round series on the road.

Clippers-Grizzlies is a rematch of the most memorable first-round series of 2012, which went to a seventh game in Memphis before the Clippers prevailed at the FedEx Forum, aka The Grind House.

The 4-5 matchup in the East is even more compelling. The fourth-seeded Nets will host their first playoff game in Brooklyn, a borough with its own amazing basketball legacy.

They’re a team that survived an early crisis that cost coach Avery Johnson his job. The Nets rallied around former Spurs assistant P.J. Carlesimo, Deron Williams went on a diet and got back in shape and they improved by 27 wins over their 2011-12 record.

Brooklyn’s opponent, the Bulls, survived an entire season without former MVP Derrick Rose and enter the playoffs tantalizing the entire NBA with the possibility the point guard might play at some point before the season is over.

Might he return against the Nets?

The prospect could change a few predictions.

The 3-6 matchup between the Nuggets and Warriors out West includes a Manimal and the NBA’s single-season record holder in 3-pointers. Only Miami had a better record than Denver since the All-Star break, but the Nuggets lost their No. 2 scorer and might be without one of their 7-footers (Timofey Mozgov) for the first round.

The Warriors will take the Nuggets as far as Stephen Curry’s right arm will carry them.

Even the 2-7 matchups have their own versions of drama.

The most successful Knicks team since the 1999 squad that fell to the Spurs in the NBA Finals faces the seventh-seeded Celtics, who know how to win in the postseason. Boston got plenty of rest for Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce in the final weeks of the season.

Then there’s the Spurs-Lakers 2-7 matchup. It looks like a walkover for the second-seeded, 58-24 Spurs against the 45-37, Mamba-less Lakers, but there’s never anything given in a series between these teams. It’s the 12th time they’ve met since 1982 — the sixth time since 2001 — and the history is rich with the dramatic, including Derek Fisher’s 0.4-second dagger in 2004.

Don’t be surprised when it takes the Spurs six games to get past a team that didn’t know it would make the playoffs until the final day of the season.